Day 264: Product Testing While Riding with a Friend

I’ve been participating in the product testing department at WTB for the past four months. That means that I ride whichever products that they need to have tested. So far I’ve tested tires, hubs, and saddles, but today I tested something that’s really unique. The product is an internally geared hub that has an infinite range of gearing in between two static gear ratios.

So there aren’t 10 gears, or 14, and instead there are in theory thousands of gears to choose from. There is a gear for you, no matter what, as long as it’s within the low and high points of the gearing. That’s the cool part about the hub. The bad part is that it weighs a ton! Just the hub weighs 10.038 lbs! Add in the rest of the parts, including the rim, tires, and shifting mechanism, and you have one heavy piece of hardware. I’ll weigh the bike at “E. B.’s” house sometime soon. I’d guess that the bike's total weight is approximately 40 lbs!

I did my test ride today with my friend “S.” He took one look at this beast of a bike and then shook his head. He had good questions about the bike/hub, and by the time that I had ridden the bike over to Ross to meet him, I had some real questions too, like “Why in the hell am I riding this bike?” I even offered to let him ride the bike, but that offer was greeted with quiet resistance…. I don’t blame him one bit. I’m chuckling right now.

I rode the super heavy bike for just under thirty miles today. There are things about the bike that are “nifty” like its shifting. I believe that newcomers to our sport might like the ease of shifting, but the weight of the bike is a deal-killer no matter how you slice or dice things. For example, I can’t imagine anyone regularly lifting this bike onto a car’s roof rack. I was made grumpy after lifting it into a bike stand in order to swap out its pedals!

“S” and I had a nice ride along the back roads of Tiburon. We stopped twice for caffeine. I was all jacked-up by the time that we left Tiburon and were headed towards the bike path that leads back to Mill Valley. I’m not drinking a lot of coffee these days, so the day's jolts of Joe made me jittery. Jittery John??

In spite of the heavy rig that I was pedaling, I had a great time riding with “S,” and the day could not have been more perfect for cycling. We stopped at several vista points wherein the views were spectacular.